Full Description
Spanning almost four decades, Dionne Brand's poetry has given rise to whole new grammars and vocabularies. With a profound alertness that is attuned to this world and open to some other, possibly future, time and place, Brand's ongoing labors of witness and imagination speak directly to where and how we live and reach beyond those worlds, their enclosures, and their violences.
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems begins with a new long poem, the titular Nomenclature for the Time Being, in which Dionne Brand's diaspora consciousness dismantles our quotidian disasters. In addition to this searing new work, Nomenclature collects eight volumes of Brand's poetry published between 1982 and 2010 and includes a critical introduction by the literary scholar and theorist Christina Sharpe.
Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems features the searching and centering cantos of Primitive Offensive; the sharp musical conversations of Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia; and the documentary losses of revolutions in Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, in which "The street was empty/with all of us standing there." No Language Is Neutral reads language, coloniality, and sexuality as a nexus. Land to Light On writes intimacies and disaffections with nation, while in thirsty a cold-eyed flÂneur surveys the workings of the city. In Inventory, written during the Gulf Wars, the poet is "the wars' last and late night witness," her job is not to soothe but to "revise and revise this bristling list/hourly." Ossuaries' futurist speaker rounds out the collection and threads multiple temporal worlds-past, present, and future.
This masterwork displays Dionne Brand's ongoing body of thought-trenchant, lyrical, absonant, discordant, and meaning-making. Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems is classic and living, a record of one of the great writers of our age.
Contents
Introduction / Christina Sharpe xvii
Nomenclature for the Time Being 1
Primitive Offensive 71
Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia 119
Winter Epigrams 121
Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia 141
Chronicles of the Hostile Sun 163
Languages 165
Sieges 181
Military Occupations 188
No Language is Neutral 223
Hard Against the Soul I 225
Return 227
No Language is Neutral 238
Hard Against the Soul 251
Land to Light On 269
I Have Been Losing Roads 271
All That Has Happened Since 286
Land to Light On 305
Dialectics 311
Islands Vanish 330
Through My Imperfect Mouth and Life and Way 335
Every Chapter of the World 341
Thirsty 357
Inventory 411
Ossuaries 497
Notes 615
Acknowledgments 619
